New Movie Moves (Beyond the Story of the Story)
I realize it has been a long time since I last updated this blog, but let’s see where things stand on the movie project now…Another step in the process has been moved along. We have set up an advisory board for the film project made up of 2 Cambodian pastors, 2 Cambodian business men, and 2 Cambodians from the creative arts (all Christians). They met together about 2 weeks ago and we presented the three story options. Initially they seemed to go for the story we considered a throw away idea. In fact, while the other two stories were posted on this blog (see the last two postings), I didn’t even post this one because we didn’t really consider it an option. In short, it was the story of a girl who is engaged to a nice boy, goes out with other friends and ends up sleeping with some other guy. Despite her efforts to cover it up, eventually her fiancé and his family find out about it. She expects him to dump her, but instead he forgives her and restores their relationship. The story is a metaphor for God’s grace and forgiveness. Well, the advisory board liked it because it also addressed a very real social problem as well. This was not what we expected at all. We considered this the weakest story by far, and it would present a number of problems in telling the story without becoming offensive to the Christian community we want to get behind this.
Well, the board members took copies of the three story treatments home to go over, and then they met again a week later to decide what story we would do. Now that they had had the chance to read through all of the stories in detail and think about it for awhile, they had changed there minds (thank goodness!). Instead, they now felt we should go with the story about the boy and the letter from his father (see previous posts for the whole story). This is kind of a sad / tragic story, and those types of stories really go over big here. Again, this wasn’t the one we thought they would pick, but it is the original story we came up with, and we all thought it was good. It also has a few difficult challenges as well. First, the story is VERY character driven, with a young boy playing a leading role. That requires good acting, and getting a good, believable performance is going to be hard. Second, it is set in the time just after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and the government is very picky about historical details on things like that. So we would have to match clothes, vehicles, etc. to the time very closely, or else the government would not approve it for release.
So now we need to work over the story, write the script, and work with the advisory board on making sure the church can and will use it as an evangelism tool. And that’s just for starters!
We also need to do training for all the technical staff and all the talent. The first training sessions will be in May, with two additional training sessions in August and November, so that we can hopefully do filming in January or February. There is a TON of stuff that needs to be done before then, but hopefully all will go well, and we should be edited and ready for release about the time we return from our deputation year in the States in the summer of 2007.
posted by Troy In Cambodia @ 9:00 AM
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